Forsaken
by LuteLyre
Summary: No one's the killer, no one's the martyr. The Gaara/Hinata fic i can't believe i wrote...but like anyway.


A/N: OMG I can't BELIEVE I wrote this. I don't really ship Gaara/Hinata. Not usually. They just seem like one of the least likely pairings. And I don't do pairings that are entirely implausible. But then this idea occurred to me via the awesome eryxl and her prompts and I couldn't get it out of my head and it demanded to be written down and Its not really Gaara/Hinata, at best it's a reallllly twisty version, so I guess I can condone it.

I do like crack, when it's written well. This isn't made of epic or anything….but I tried my best.

For erxyl again! I like requests! They are inspiring! Erxyl, I'm sorry because I don't think this is exactly what you were suggesting and my weird brain messed it up, but I hope you like it anyway! i can't wait to read your Gaara/Hina!

Disclamier: I do not own Gaara. I think I'm okay with that, he's a wee bit scary.

Warnings: T for language and some iffy themes about blood. There's also some references to religion, but in a twisty way….um yeah.

Pairings: don't assume it's a Gaara/Hinata. It is only about .25% G/H. Let your own mind run wild! The pairing world is open to all!

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Forsaken

_No one's the killer and no one's the martyr,_

_The world who made us can no longer love us,_

_Least of all you._

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The darkness soothes his always-hot skin, rippling around his body and through follicles of crimson-dyed hair in little gusts, and he wishes it was louder.

It is a still night, stiller and quieter than he likes or is used to, because in Suna the red-light district is always loud and lewd and hearty throughout the night. In Suna he stalks the highest adobe rooftops above the drunk men and painted women and smirks to himself at the way their movements falter and their laughter dies after he passes overhead, phantom and unnoticeable but they can _sense_ something, something shadowed and leeching and prickling all their subconscious, dipping claws light against the back of their necks.

But Konoha is staid and their entertainment quarter is far from where he is supposed to sleep, and in all honesty he isn't particularly interested in it, because whorehouses are the same everywhere. The stillness in this leaf-strewn metropolis is a new type of intriguing.

His hair is sweaty, drenched and sticking to his scalp as he always is sweaty from the sand that never leaves his skin and the effort it takes to keep a demon caged within his mind.

Occasionally, when he is in an especial mood, Gaara wonders who exactly the true demon is, and if they all were just tricking him into believing he kept his bodies occupant dormant when, truthfully, it is himself that is being locked up.

When he gets this thought into his head, Gaara is particularly difficult to deal with.

Like now.

Temari was supposed to be watching him, (They are in a different village and the coup hasn't started yet and they must be _careful_) but he does not mind being brutal with words when he is not brutal with jutsu and Temari recoils easily, drawing tight around herself in spirals to protect against the bite of her little "brothers" vile tongue. He broke through her defenses like the dry sand they were. He is so familiar with sand that it is effortless, and that might be why he does it, because nothing is ever effortless. (Keep your eyes open) When he has spoken the words that make her flee from him he leaves where they are staying—nothing covered in sand, yet, and isn't that a fucking novelty—and wanders the strangely still streets.

The roofs are shaped differently here, and the smell is sharp, and the air is cooler against him. He is hot hot hot and in Suna it is fucking miserable; he often feels heady slow-baked and palpitating, the heat radiating waves around him and he must wade through them in order to move, so he doesn't move at all, just lets the sand move for him while he remains so very quiet and focused on the act of raising his ribs high enough to breathe.

But here, here it is just enough, just just just enough for him to be quick and light and feel almost like breathing isn't a chore. The heat nears being ignorable; not quite there, but close.

If Gaara knew the word for how he was feeling, he would have called it giddy.

He glides through this strange village and lets his sand swirl loosely. Shukaku shifts beautifully in his mind, turning over as though rousing himself and feeling deliciously like he is stretching, pulsing and pushing and pressing a few limits with a few tendrils of black-soaked chakra.

It is like cracking his neck and feeling the joint pop. It is like yawning. It is glorious. Shukaku is restless, and because Gaara is very much in a mood and perhaps sick in the head and definitely curiously unsettled by all that has happened in this new village, he is restless too.

He glides along, feeling the desire to crush something melting through his conscious like wax as Shukaku wakes up until he hovers just beyond Gaara's boundaries, a figment curling smoke in his head, slightly hazy and slightly sharp, sending jolts along his spine and a slick craving through his throat.

Shukaku craves blood, and Gaara and Shukaku are one and the same. Right now definitely, most of the time certainly, occasionally not. But mostly the same. (Who is the one that is caged, really?) Gaara finds himself wondering how the taste of iron-rich platelets would pool on his tongue.

Every time he wonders, remembers in a flood of lifestream in his mouth, and then forgets again for next time. It is something he has noticed and analyzes critically in his moments of rare reflection. Most humans would shirk from this taste their body wants, would deny and ignore, but Gaara learned his tastes young—as humans do— and having a monster in your brain influences some things.

Many things in fact. Gaara analyzes, but is never repulsed with his findings.

His eyes are black-ringed, his hair waving eerily in a kind of back-lit light, his mouth oh so carefully elongated under the glow of street lamps.

A face lands in his head, strange hair and eyebrows and pupils black like a midnight pond. Interesting. The boy he broke today, (or was it yesterday—time is not clear when you exist solely for yourself-) the one who sped faster than his sand and managed to touch him. Gaara glances to where his arm was injured, and feels supremely irritated.

It had felt so odd, the kick and the collision and the singing that poured from the muscles of the boy Gaara crunched up and spit out mangled.

The stinging as Gaara's body moved in a way he had not directed it to, bent away from the assault like a bow.

Shukaku rumbled in his head, glistened behind his veils. There is irritation, and bloodlust. There is confusion. (The smile, the declarations, the legs that couldn't walk trying to stand for something else, and why was this village so strange?)

Gaara turns toward the hospital.

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No one sees him of course, because Gaara is stealth and sly in the night, the epitome of shinobi sleek. The halls are so quiet, lined in dark and smelling of disinfectant that tingles his nose. He searches for the scent of the boy, raging perseverance and faltering confidence, and stops abruptly short in the stairwell, somewhere between the fifth and sixth floor.

There is a person there on the landing. They are a ninja definitely, a ghost possibly, a girl most likely. But he is not sure. The person has no scent.

They speak, in a voice so hushed and whispering it is like silk and he identifies it a female voice. "Gaara-sama!"

He means to kill her and continue on to his destination, but the hitch in her voice is interesting. 'Sama' is a title he knows well. He is 'sama' to the ones who call themselves his siblings; he is 'sama' to the people of Suna. But no one here has addressed him by that, for they have no reason to. Gaara knows they don't, though he doesn't care why, but the truth of it is that the people of Konoha are too proud to.

Hinata is not proud. She also can feel royalty like she feels the sun, obvious and cloaked around the those on the thrones. Hinata recognizes the royal, the special, the monster, simply by looking. This is because the Huuyga are extraordinarily aristocratic, and because she is the least blind of them all.

She sees this boy with the blood hair and milk skin and sharp, sharp teeth, chakra racing erratically over skin that dances with sand-grains, and knows immediately what he is.

And, because she is the only Huuyga who is not blind, she knows where he is going. She opens her mouth, open and close, open and close like a gaping fish out of water, because Hinata is out of her element (she never had one at all anyway) and monstrous royalty is towering in front of her, red and black backdrop against the white of the stairs and her eyes. She knows where he is going, but will make no attempt to stop him, though her hands shake with fear—for herself and Lee-kun, and strangely for this demon-child—because Hinata doesn't know how to say no to royalty.

(Not yet)

Suddenly the universe is a very small place. Shukaku thirsts for blood, for wet dripping splatters and animal hunger, but the girl in front of him is a study in things that Gaara is unfamiliar with.

Her eyes are white, her hair is black. (Nobody in Suna has white eyes. Nobody in Suna has black hair. Theirs is a culture of rust and brown, washed out and sand-gritty. His own hair, before he dyed it, was the palest dirty blonde-brown he'd seen, and he felt like he was drowning in the adobe walls that surrounded him whenever he looked in the mirror) Her voice was silk and her hands were trembling. She should smell of fear, of the plush rabbit dashing for its burrow, but she does not. This is why he steps close, very very close, to inhale in only a cold sort of chalky blankness.

Hinata is a blank slate; unwritten, unplanned, and uncared for.

Huuyga do not care for those that do not claw their way to the top. Neji is a fighter, a reacher, a the-grass-over-yonder-is-greener. Hinata knows that Neji is the one who should've been born to the main family, for she is everything that the Huuyga desire for their cursed cousins and he is everything the bold and noble main branch must attain. She is only fading fading fading, gone.

She is also cold.

Gaara is suddenly very hot next to the blizzard that weaves its way through worry in front of him. Shukaku is fucking roaring in his head now, and his sand moves in a kind of slow frenzy, his skin is dripping with the effort of keeping everything together. He blinks. (Keep your eyes open)

_Taste it, crave it, need it, bleed it, and all the love in the world is for others, never you, and that stain on your forehead is all you get brat. _

Hinata watches the god before her, (because that is what he really is, he knows it and you know it and everyone knows it for that is why they cower and run, sniveling and dead before they turn away. Why deny the obvious when you are all-seeing?) and she is petrified wood, marble-colored and whisper-textured and family-treasured not at all.

Daemon-struck is an interesting notion, and one that deserves further reflection, but right now there is only the last few seconds before she is redness spilling on the hospital tile and gone, and funnily enough, she doesn't think she has much to lose.

_The tea you pour in little porcelain cups is just like you, bland and odorless and flavorless, white on white on white on white and when did you ever have any value dearie? _

Gaara feels the chill tentative on his skin, the tiniest amount of dew, and finally can channel himself into action. Slow, languorous action, but action nonetheless; this quivering, scentless female is something new.

He wonders what her blood would taste like. Would it be ice or as hot as any other mortals that gushes like thunder through their veins and he hears all around him, every day until he salivates? Would it be bitter or sweet? Black or red?

He is curious, and a curious god is a dangerous one, but Hinata follows her prayerbooks duitfully.

(When ninja die, that is the end. So it is best to worship the living, and find the gods around you, because they are as close to ethereal as you are going to get, little shruiken girl.)

The sand is grabbing her wrist and she is as limp as soggy rice paper, no fight in her arms. (She is no martyr for the greater good, dying on a stake and singing to her apparitions. She is simply nothing, as unsimple as that is…)

He raises her arm with sand and sees the fine white skin of her inner wrist, almost translucent, the veins blue and stark—

His mouth lips across her skin, his teeth burn and she is fucking fainting, of course, because there is only a set point that she can take of the world and after that things go riddled with tears and gaps in the fabric.

(But there isn't much blame, because if your mother threw herself in the river and you saw them take her body out, reeds and bloated blue skin and once curved lips now shriveled worms, you'd faint too.)

Her blood is black and cool, sliding down his throat and seeping into his sick, sick mind. (All gods are sick in some fashion) It tastes sweeter than berries, sweeter than juice, saccharine and overripe.

He drops her wrist and realizes that she is unconscious, slumped across the stair railing like the puppets that Kankuro plays with and hangs by their necks with his hands glowing blue.

Gaara might be amused, and amused royalty is the royalty you run from, but Hinata is asleep.

and then Shukaku rustles in his mind like a jaw popping back into place, like standing up after sitting for hours. He could kill her now, watch the life drip out of the doll-girl-body, but there wouldn't be much point.

She is too interesting anyway.

Konoha is too strange a village, what with glass people and silent nights and boys who stand on shattered legs. Gaara doesn't understand and has never understood, but when he is moody perhaps he thinks he'd like to.

When he gets moody he is also particularly difficult to deal with.

Like now.

He passes by her up the stairs, silent and unconcerned. She will die soon, because the coup is coming, and then the roar will drown out his ears and make his heart beat a little faster than the slow pace of sand trickling through his fingers.

Shukaku is purring through his brain, heating and insatiable, and Gaara wonders again just who is caged as his mouth widens and his chakra soaks black.

(Gods are never truly loved, demons are always feared, and he is no exception, just the odd rule and all alone.)

He turns into the hospital hallway.

By the time he reaches the door where a Konoha gennin sleeps, he has forgotten the taste of the girl with no scent.

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Hinata will wake long after the god is gone, cold and teeth-chattering and sweat like ice on skin, and she will know that she has been spared death, and feel a vague sense of creeping loss.

X

Later, a blonde blue-eyed demon will crack his cage in half and knock him from the skies.

Later, she will see something that is not royal or godlike, but she will take a leap of faith anyway.

Now, there is only a blank slate girl and a bloodthirsty demon-boy and the fault in their stars is as vast as the sky.

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_Fin_

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A/N: And that is all. I don't think there is anything I can say… the angst bunny caught me?

Commentary is much appreciated!

Thankyou for reading! –Lutelyre


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